Published: Andreas Wiebe, 04 February 2010 - 23:40

I've been running some honeypots for over 6 months now but haven't received a single spam.

This is the second time I've run this experiment, the last time was several years ago and it landed me with several thousand spams a month, this time I haven't received one. Over 6 months of publicly posted email addresses on my websites and not a single piece of spam even with decent traffic volume across the sites.

It's almost enough to make me think that email addresses aren't being scraped anymore, almost. The truth is I suspect spammers are still scraping content, just not my pages. They're after easier fish; sites that are easy to find, sites with multiple users and multiple posted addresses - forums and the like come to mind... guess I'll be setting up a forum next ;)

On a related note the whois database seems to still be fueling spammer activity, just days after registering domain I start seeing spam. Amazing.